The telephone industry currently offers its craftspersons a variety of manually operated impact tool configurations for cutting and/or seating individual telephone wires in terminal blocks that are mounted to telephone office mainframe and remote terminal units. For an illustration of documentation describing a variety of non-limiting examples of such manually operated impact tools, attention may be directed to U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,195,230, 4,696,090, 4,567,639, and 4,241,496 and the patents cited therein.
Typically, a mechanically operated impact tool has a generally longitudinal handle from which a wire-gripping and cutting head extends. The interior of the handle may contain an axially translatable hammer element, which is biased by a compression spring to strike the cutting head, and thereby cut one end of a wire that has been seized or inserted into a wire capture and gripping end region of the cutting head.
In accordance with the operation of one conventional tool configuration, the craftsperson grasps the impact tool handle and pushes it by hand against a wire in a terminal receptacle. A hammer release element within the handle is thereby moved into alignment with the hammer travel path, so that the force stored in a main compression spring is mechanically released, causing the hammer to be rapidly propelled toward and impact the cutting head, so that the end of the wire is cut and becomes seated in the terminal.
One of the principal shortcomings of one type of mechanical impact tools currently in use is the need for the craftsperson to push the handle with more force than is required to compress the main spring. This need for additional force is due to the fact that the hammer release element employs a (wedge-configured) push-plate that must be moved transverse to the hammer's translation axis, in order to achieve alignment with an insertion slot, and allow the hammer to be released. Since the push-plate is moved by the application of force along the handle axis, the total amount of axially imparted force required to operate the tool is that required to both compress the main spring and move the push-plate. As a consequence, its use is time-consuming and labor-intensive, thereby increasing the cost of installation of telephone equipment. Thus, it would be desirable to reduce the amount of effort required to operate such a tool, and thereby lessen the labor burden on the craftsperson.